1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to data processing systems. More particularly, this invention relates to the detection of computer viruses.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is known to provide anti-virus computer programs that detect computer viruses by detecting known characteristics of particular computer viruses. These known characteristics are usually known code sequences or known types of processing activity. Whilst such an approach is successful and efficient for the majority of computer viruses, it is generally only effective against computer viruses that are already known or are highly similar to known viruses. This is particularly the case in the instance of polymorphic viruses which serve to continuously change their code to have different code sequences in different generations of the virus.